by Anne Rice
Dad was very scared for me. “Don’t go back, Belinda,” he said. “Stand your ground. Daryl has been here, Belinda. He insists he knows you were in the city this spring. But I used the same damn bluff on him, you know the police bit, and boy, did he back off. He’s ashamed, Belinda. Ashamed nobody’s called the authorities, and you know what he finally did? He begged me to tell him just if I knew you were all right. I played dumb, Belinda, but he’s going to find you, just like Marty did. Checkmate, Belinda. Remember, you can do it. They will not do anything to hurt Bonnie. Bonnie’s the one who matters to them, all of them.”
“But what about the salon, G.G.?” I was still frantic. “I can handle it, Belinda,” he insisted.
I never did and do not know to this day how bad it really got. I am only hoping till this moment that Dad is really all right.
That final week in Carmel was the last peace I really had. It was wonderful, our walks on the beach, our talks together. I tried hard to keep us from going back. But in your nice agreeable way you insisted we return to 5an Francisco.
And I was looking over my shoulder from then on out. I knew people were spying on us. I knew it. And as it turned out, I was right.
Meantime Susan’s second TV movie premiered in early September, and it got a thirty percent share of the ratings, and it was damned good. Then “Champagne Flight” had its season opener with your friend Alex Clementine, and I watched it while you were upstairs working. I don’t think you even knew.
Mom was terrific. No matter what happens to her she is always there for the camera. And she seemed to be putting the pain in it all right. But there was a new aspect to her. For the first time Mom looked gorgeously gaunt. She was the ghost of herself on the screen and I mean she was a spellbinder. And so, frankly, was the whole show. And technically, well, it was even more into the rock-video dream mode, with hypnotic music and snappy camera work. Film noir again all the way.
Then not two days after that, you told me Alex Clementine was coming, he was your friend, and you wanted me to go to dinner, and you got very adamant about it, which was not like you at all. Of course, I knew Alex Clementine. I met him in London when Mom was working on a picture with him years ago. And worse, I had just seen him last year at the Cannes festival. And, of course, I’d almost run into him at that publishing party the very first afternoon we met.
No way could I go with you. And if you brought him back to the house to show him the paintings, it would be all over right then and there.
I was frantic. But I was hoping. If I couldn’t get you to New Orleans, maybe someplace else.
And then Marty showed up again. I had a very strong feeling someone was following me when I hit the Golden Gate Bridge to go to the Marin stables and then, when I was riding, I realized I’d been right.
Now you know what the riding meant to me. But I wonder if you ever realized what an escape from worry it was. When I was on my horse, I felt I was away from everything in the world. And one of my favorite roads to take out of the hills of Cronkite was the one down to the ocean beach at Kirby Cove. It was closed to traffic most of the time, and I would often be the only person down there, riding in the surf, and it was a truly magnificent spot.
You could see the bridge and the city to the left of you and the ocean to the far right.
Well, if I had known on this afternoon that it was the last time I’d ride at Kirby Cove, I wonder how I would have felt.
I was halfway down before I saw a Mercedes on the road behind me, and then I realized it was Marty and I took off, down one of the steep trails. Of course, he came all the way to the campgrounds at the bottom, and there I figured, well, OK, it’s crazy to run away from him. He is not going to leave me alone till we talk.
He wanted me to go to the hotel with him. I said hell no to that. But I did tie up the horse and get in the car with him. The horse was scaring him. He had never ridden in his life.
He said he had something pretty heavy to tell me. He had a manila envelope with him, and he asked me if I could guess what was inside.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I said. “What is this?” If there had been any lingering love last time, there was very little now. The envelope scared me. He scared me. And I was afraid I was going to break down.
“Your boyfriend down there on Seventeenth Street, what kind of a man is he that he paints pictures of you naked all over the place?”
“What are you talking about?” I asked him.
“Honey, I’ve had a couple of dicks watching you. They went on the roof of the apartment house next door to you, strictly routine. They saw all this stuff through the attic windows. Then they checked it out again from the balcony of the house across the street. I’ve got photographs of the whole gallery—” He went to open the envelope.
I said: “You son of a bitch! Just stop it right here.”
I knew he could see how scared I was. He got right to the point. “Look, it doesn’t give me kicks to stick my nose in other people’s business. But Bonnie gave me no choice. Last week she said she knew for sure we were living together, and she tried it again, pills this time, and enough to kill a mule. OK, I figured, this lady’s going to die if I don’t stop it, and I’m the only one in the world who can. I told her about you and Jeremy Walker. I gave the name, the address, the whole works. I brought in the file on him, the clippings my secretaries at the studio had rounded up. Still she didn’t believe it. Belinda in San Francisco living with an artist? Come on, did I think she was as stupid as everybody else thought she was? She said she knew I wouldn’t let that happen, that I was keeping you someplace in Los Angeles and I had been from the start. It was the lies that drove her crazy. The lies that made her lie awake and all that. OK, I told her I’d prove it. I sent these dicks up here to prove it. Get some pictures of you together. Catch you on the street together, find a window, get you going through the front door. Well, this is what they got, Belinda, three-hundred-sixty-degree angles on the headquarters of Kiddie-porn West. This stuff makes Susan Jeremiah’s film look like Disney. It could make Humbert Humbert rise from the dead.”
I told him to stop. I told him you could never show those pictures. It was out of the question. It would be the end for your career. Those pictures were our secret and to keep his filthy men from looking in our windows.
“Don’t put me on,” he said. “The guy’s using you, Belinda! He’s got nude photographs up there with the paintings. He could sell that junk now to Penthouse for a bundle. But that’s not what he’s after. Bonnie pegged him immediately. She says he’s got a nose for publicity that’s better than that Andy Warhol screwball in New York. He’s going to make his big splash with nude paintings of Bonnie’s daughter and to hell with you after that.”
I went crazy. I started screaming. “Marty, he doesn’t even know who I am!” I said. “Did Mother even stop to think that maybe this wasn’t connected to her!”
“She knows it’s connected. And, honey, so do I. It’s just like what happened to you with Susan Jeremiah, don’t you see? These people use you because you’re Bonnie’s kid.”
I was out of my head. I would have hit him, but I was too busy holding my hands over my ears. I was crying. And trying to tell him that it wasn’t that way, it had nothing to do with Mother, goddamn it. “Don’t you see what she’s doing!” I said. “She’s making herself the center of it’. And Jeremy doesn’t even know about her. Oh, God, what are you doing to me? What do you really want!”
“The hell he doesn’t,” Marty said. “He’s had a lawyer name of Dan Franklin snooping all over Los Angeles, bugging my lawyers about a picture they handed out in a couple of places when they were trying to locate you. Says he just happened on the picture in the Haight-Ashbury, I mean, the guy is Walker’s lawyer, known him for twenty years. And he’s trying to reach Susan Jeremiah. He’s been bugging people at United Theatricals night and day.”
He went on talking. He went on and on and on. But I didn’t hear what else he said. I knew Dan Fran
klin’s name. I knew he was your lawyer. I’d seen the envelopes on your desk with his name on them. I’d heard his messages on the answering machine.
I sat there crushed. I couldn’t say another thing. Yet I couldn’t believe what Marty was saying. You couldn’t be planning to use the whole thing for publicity, not you!
Dear God, you were going through a battle that none of these people could ever understand.
Yet all kinds of things were coming back. You yourself had said, “I’m using you,” those very words. And what about that strange conversation we’d had the very first afternoon after I’d moved in with you when you had told me you wanted to destroy your own career?
But nobody could be that devious, nobody could. Least of all you.
Finally I said again that you couldn’t know, that Marty had somehow gotten it all wrong. I told him you’d never show those pictures. You made thousands off your books, probably millions. Why would you show the pictures?
But I stopped suddenly. You did want to show them. I knew you did. Marty started talking again.
“I’ve checked this guy from every angle. He’s harmless but he’s weird, real weird. He’s got a house in New Orleans—did you know that?—and nobody but a housekeeper has lived in it for years. His mother’s stuff is just like she left it in the bedroom. Brush, comb, perfume bottles, and all. It’s like that novel, that Dickens thing, you know, the one William Holden talks about in the movie Sunset Boulevard with the old lady named Miss Havisham or something, just sitting there and nothing being touched year after year. And I’ll tell you something else. Walker’s rich, real rich. He never touches the money his mother left him. He lives off the income from the income from the capital he socked away himself, that kind of thing. Yeah, I think he would show these paintings. I think he’d do it. I’ve been reading all the interviews with him, the press file we made on him, he’s a real art nut, he says peculiar things.”
It was hell listening to this. It was like seeing our world, yours and mine, reflected in a carnival mirror. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I told Marty he was crazy. I called him crazy every way that I knew.
“No, honey, he’s using you. And you know what his lawyer is doing? He’s getting the dirt on us. He’s figuring out why you ran, what happened, you know, that kind of thing. Why else would he be looking for Susan Jeremiah? No, this artist guy is a fruitcake. And your mother’s right. He’ll show the pictures and he’ll use the dirt on us to keep us off his case and, of course, you won’t do a thing to him when it happens, will you? You won’t accuse him of anything any more than you accused me. And Bonnie and I will be left with all the questions—how did we let it happen and all that?”
I told him I wouldn’t listen anymore. You didn’t know. I was trying to get out of the car.
He pulled me back by the arm.
“Belinda, ask yourself, why am I telling you this? I’m trying to protect you, too. Bonnie is for busting this guy now. She says if the cops pick you up at his place, nobody will listen to anything you say about me. She’s for calling Daryl. She’s for moving in right now.”
“You burn in hell, you son of a bitch!” I told him. “And you tell Bonnie this for me. I’ve got the number of a National Enquirer reporter in my pocket. I’ve always had it, got it from him on Sunset Strip. And you better believe he will listen to what I have to say about you both. Him and the social workers and the juvenile judge will listen. If you hurt Jeremy, you’ll go to jail.”
But by that time I was out the car and I was running down the road. But Marty came after me. He grabbed hold of me, and I turned around and hit him, but it didn’t do any good.
Something really awful was happening. I had never seen Marty like he was now. He wasn’t just angry, the way you were the night we had our terrible and last fight. Something else was happening that only happens to men, something I don’t think any woman on earth can understand.
He pulled me down onto the ground under the pine trees and he was trying to pull off my clothes. I was screaming and kicking him, but there was not a soul for miles to see or hear. And he was crying and saying terrible things to me, he was calling me a little bitch and saying he couldn’t take any more, he had had enough. And then I started roaring, making sounds I didn’t know I could make. I scratched at him, I pulled his hair. And the simple fact was, he could not do what he meant to do. Not unless he slugged me or something that bad. It was just a brawl that was happening, and then at one point I got him off balance and I threw him over on his back. I got away from him and started running again, stopping only long enough to zip my jeans again before I got on my horse.
I rode out of there like something in the Western movies. In fact I did a bad bad thing. I went right up the trails on the sides of the hills, knowing it was dangerous for the horse. She could have fallen, broken her leg, worse.
But she made it. We made it. We got back to the stables before Marty ever did, if he was even following, and I just about stripped the gears on the MG-TD making for the Golden Gate.
When I got into the house, I went in the bathroom. I had bruises on my arms and on my back but none on my face. OK, you wouldn’t notice in the dark.
Then I checked in your office. And sure enough, Dan Franklin’s envelopes were there. No doubt that he was your lawyer, so that part was true, OK.
I sat there stunned, not knowing who or what to believe, and then I went up to my room. The tapes, the magazines, hadn’t been touched as far as I could see. But what was all over the walls? Susan Jeremiah. Five posters of her by this time, from the pictures I had clipped out of magazines all year. Wasn’t it only natural that you thought I was related to Susan? I mean, good God, you did want to know who I was.
About this time you came in. You’d been out shopping for dinner, and you had a big bouquet of yellow flowers and you came up and put them in my arms. I’ll never forget the way you looked at that moment. I have a freeze-frame forever in my head. You were so handsome. And you looked so innocent and honest, too. You probably don’t remember, but I asked you if you loved me, and you laughed so naturally and you said I knew you did.
I thought then, This is the most special and truly kind man that I have ever known. He has never hurt anyone. He is only trying to find out, and Marty has twisted the whole thing.
I went upstairs with you and then I looked out the windows at the roof of the apartment house next to us and then across Seventeenth at the balcony of the other on the top floor. No one was there now. But from the big hills between here and Twenty-fourth Street anybody could have photographed us through these windows. There was no hiding from a thousand points of light.
I wonder if you remember that evening. It was our last good time in that house. You looked so beautiful to me that evening, all distracted and lost in the paintings and forgetting completely about dinner, by the way, as usual, and no noise in the attic but the sound of your brush touching the palette and then the canvas and you now and then murmuring something to yourself.
It got darker and darker. Couldn’t see anything through the glass. Just the paintings all around us. And it didn’t seem possible that one man had made them, that he had spun out all this complicated and detailed work.
I knew you did not know who I was. I knew it with all my heart. And I had to protect you from Mom and Marty, even if that meant protecting you from myself.
Your world was so alien to them. What did they know of what these pictures meant?
One year and two months until I was eighteen, that’s all we needed, but we would never have it, not with Marty and Mom and Uncle Daryl—and now you. Yes, you and Dan Franklin were our enemies now, too. Well, the following night was the end of it.
I never went to the rock concert that caused us to fight. I went instead to a phone booth and spent hours trying to get in touch with G.G. and then finally reaching him and asking him what I should do. “Call Bonnie,” he told me. “Call her and tell her, she hurts Jeremy Walker and you hurt Marty. Tell her you’ll call that Na
tional Enquirer number. Chess, Belinda, and it’s still your move.”
But something during that dinner with Alex Clementine tipped you off. Maybe he made the connection for you between me and Susan Jeremiah. One line or two about Susan’s film at Cannes and the girl who starred in it would have done that.
I don’t know what happened. I only knew we fought that night as we had never fought. And you were not the man Marty and Mom believed you to be when we were fighting. You were my Jeremy, innocent and tormented and trying to get me to explain it all so that everything would be all right.
How the hell could I explain it all so everything would be all right? Just at least let me make that call to Mom, I was thinking, let me try for the final stalemate, and then maybe, just maybe I can think of some way to tell you something at least.
But I didn’t really understand how far things had gone till the next morning, after you had left the house and I found my videotapes on the closet floor. The magazines were all messed up and you had left the Newsweek open. Yes, you had your answers, or at least you thought you did, and you wanted me to know you had them.
There was no turning away in silence anymore.
For an hour after you had gone, I sat at the kitchen table trying to figure what to do.
G.G. had said call Bonnie. Stalemate. Ollie Boon had said use my power against them, the way they used it against me.
But even if I held them off, what about you? What about your destiny with the paintings? What about you and me?
It was out of the question that I draw you into this as it was, the way I had done to G.G. and Ollie Boon. G.G. and Ollie had lived together for five years before I separated them. And to hear of G.G. battling these lawyers of Marty’s was excruciating. With you it would have been even worse. After all, G.G. was my dad, wasn’t he? You had come into this so innocently, so unsuspecting, and you had never given me anything but the purest love. If worse came to worse, you might tell me to go back to them, your lawyer would probably tell you to do exactly that.
